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SxSW Wrapup
March 13th, 2008 by John BrianThis was Beaconfire’s 
first year sending people to South by Southwest. Eve and I went to get connected to the buzz on the latest web 2.0 apps, meet with non-profits interested in incorporating more rich media into their online outreach and to recruit contractors to help us with design, development and production.
After being here all week, I think it’s worth sending a much bigger delegation next - there’s just too much for two people to cover. For example, while I was attending Findable Rich Media and Eve was attending Design is in the Details, we missed AJAX and Flash mistakes, Accessibility: Basics Quickly, and What Teens Want, all of which would have been valuable panels.
The tendency to stack useful panels on top of each other was something that I heard a lot of folks bemoaning, and hopefully it won’t be as bad next year, but it would still have been good to have had an information architect, functional consultant, and software engineer with us to attend some of the sessions outside our areas of expertise.
Just as there were too many 
concurrent events during the day, there was also too much going on at night for us to cover everything. The evening festivities were great chances for us to network with others working in the nonprofit space, and hopefully we’ll be bringing some of the folks we met onto projects as clients, contractors and partners.
There were also a few events that we really didn’t get the chance to participate in. The core conversations were a new feature this year that I missed out on, due to session conflicts (not sure about Eve), but hope to try next year. Similarly, there were a variety of design and dev competitions that we talked about participating in in future years. And I wasn’t able to make time to attend book readings or demos at the Adobe Day Stage, except when they coincided with a lunch break.
In the end, I think SxSW is a valuable conference for non-profits and the consultants who work with them to attend. The applications and ideas presented were for the most part universal, and it’s a great look at where the web is going in the next year. While, as I’ve noted, it is to some extent a gathering of early adopters (note that percentage of Twitter users and iPhoners), it’s also a chance to get to meet the super-activists, those top-shelf constituents who will make use of the advanced features of your site that make them evangelists for your cause.
And let’s not kid 
ourselves - the people attending the conference were activists in addition to being technologists. Jokes about voting in Texas got a good reaction, many a MacBook sported an Obama, Clinton or "Stop Global Warming" sticker, and every time I told someone about Beaconfire’s nonprofit portfolio, there was at least one organization that caused them to say "I know them - they do great work." Many of the startups that are just pioneering an idea were excited by the possibility of partnering with leading nonprofits.
I’ll continue to followup with takeaways on the individual sessions - for Beaconfire, next week we’ll have a significant presence at NTC, so look forward to seeing posts from there.
I’ve added a few more pictures below the fold.
As usual, captions apply to the photo below; check Flickr for the full sized versions.
Neither Eve nor I got a chance to check out SxSW Open Format, whcih is apparently an open mic that anyone can go up and talk about their product, idea, gripe, or thing they love most about Ron Paul. Maybe next year…
The smokers’ balconies were also a location for film crews to conduct interviews outside the noise and crowds of the convention hall. That said, it was also rainy for a good part of the conference, so it was likely not much fun to be a smoker.
Tired of walking around? Preferential seating for those who can pronounce Grznzqöt. In all seriousness, though, the conference planners did a great job of lining up sponsors to keep costs down for attendees.
